Choosing to/not to Believe? Not Possible?

[robvalue]

Even those who aren't indoctrinated still live in societies saturated with religious thinking and mythology.

I think the problem here is what you mean by "faith". It's a vague word if you don't pin down exactly what you mean. It could be, for example:

(1) Probability-based confidence in a particular outcome, based on previous relevant experiences

(2) Trust placed in a person that they will very likely act a certain way, or achieve a goal, based on your previous knowledge of that person

(3) Continuing to hold onto a belief, in spite of there being a lack of evidence for it, or indeed evidence to the contrary

(4) Picking an answer at random, or based on how the answer makes you feel, without any way of estimating the likelihood of it being correct

(5) Claims of absolutely certainty as opposed to provisional analysis of possibilities

I can choose to revisit relevant information I have to see if a better understand develops, which might change my beliefs. I can choose whether or not to look at new information that is presented to me which I'm told is relevant, to see if it changes my beliefs. I can choose to tell people I believe something that I don't. I can even try to lie to myself, and to eventually delude myself into believing something I otherwise wouldn't, over a period of time. I can pick an answer to a question as a guess. But I cannot choose to truly believe something I didn't before, just because I want to, or because someone pressures me to do so.

I think that holding onto beliefs (and lack of beliefs) until new evidence/understanding emerges came about as an evolutionary benefit. Imagine the danger of being able to choose to genuinely believe you can't be killed, or to stop believing that gravity will take effect on you if you walk off a cliff. Someone able to do this wouldn't survive very long to pass on their genes. The effort with which brains hold onto beliefs can be so strong that situation (3) from above occurs, with the brain throwing up all kinds of mental defences. It seems to me that the longer a belief has been held, and the more emotionally invested a person is in that belief, the harder the brain will fight to keep it in place.

[ignoramus]

Just to add to Rob's.

Everyone has beliefs... We are talking specifically about religious faith.
Sure, homeboys can turn to Jesus ... People can and do for many psychological reasons.

The elephant in the room still remains though.
Indoctrination is needed while young for religions to thrive. It's how the mechanism works.
The rest are all exceptions to the rule.

Belief in something you cannot feel or see or hear is NOT something that we evolved to "believe" in for our survival. Hence blind faith.

(There's millions of illogical absurdities about religious belief but what makes me laugh the most is that God waited hundreds of thousands of years until we invented writing /or the printing press to speak to our species though his sacred texts! So all those millions of cavemen died fighting the good fight to survive and none of them were allowed access into heaven even though they were also God's creatures? Give me a break...)

[robvalue]

Yup. I firmly belief that if people stopped indoctrination children into any particular religion, it would fade into obscurity within a couple of generations. It's already happening here in England.

[Angrboda]

Belief in something you cannot feel or see or hear is NOT something that we evolved to "believe" in for our survival. Hence blind faith.

I disagree. We evolved to believe that other people have minds, filled with beliefs and emotions like our own, yet we cannot see, hear, or feel them.

---

Belief doesn't seem as simple as people make it out to be. There certainly does appear to be an element of will to it, in that people can want to change, and that desire is often followed by concrete change. And people can consciously commit to behaviors, such as immersing themselves in a religious belief, which leads to change in the direction of the commitment. So I think to say that will is totally uninvolved is incorrect.

Then, also, instinct plays a role. It's a well known psychological fact that it's easier to continue believing something, once that belief has been formed, than to change and embrace a different belief. We have biases which affect the way that we interpret information such that our pre-existing beliefs are most times confirmed, independent of what the evidence shows. So in some sense, believing is an autonomous process which doesn't follow the facts. So saying our belief is a determinate outcome of consideration of the facts is, I think, too much a simplification. Any fact can be interpreted as in favor of or against a belief, depending upon how we interpret it, so there's more to our evaluation than just a blunt, facts in, belief out, kind of process.

But then it is also true that in some way, perhaps not entirely determinate, our beliefs are related to the facts. We could come to a belief in the absence of facts, and perhaps that's how people originally do form beliefs. However, facts can change the course of belief, or at least, our opinion of those facts. A religious person who discovers that most of the claims of their religion are based on lies is unlikely to simply ignore that fact and continue to believe without some reconsideration. And whether it's confabulatory or not, we all construct a narrative of reasons and justification for what we believe out of what we consider the facts. Without facts, we couldn't construct that narrative, even if that narrative is a selective cross-section of the things we know, geared toward the existing belief, that narrative is ultimately constructed out of supposed facts.

And it's well known that people change beliefs for reasons that aren't rational, such as emotion. This is usually highlighted in terms of when people make dramatic changes in belief based upon emotion, but it's probably always active in the background, influencing our belief.

Atheists frequently say that they lack belief, but at the same time, most would deny the existence of God if forced to take a stand one way or the other. So, I think there is a description of belief that may be more or less true, but there are also a lot of other factors going on in belief that are not as explicit.

People also want to think of belief as binary, either you do or you don't. I suspect it's not so simple. First, we compartmentalize, so we have strong beliefs in one area and weaker in others. Then there's the whole idea of 'strength' of belief; what is that but an indication that there is some kind of loading going on beyond simply being on or off?

So I think belief is a complex process, and as a mental object, it's far from binary. So I don't believe it's as simple a matter as "facts in, belief out."

[robvalue]

I agree belief is very complex. What I think is impossible though, yet many theists seem to tell me is easy to do, is to flip beliefs on a whim. There's no way I can do that. Nor can I suddenly decide to find evidence convincing that I previously didn't. It would have to be a gradual process, if absolutely nothing new is happening.

I'm not saying you were claiming people can switch their beliefs so easily of course

[Angrboda]

[I_am_not_mafia]

Can you deliberately choose to believe as an adult after all this time that Santa Claus does in fact exist? Possibly, but only with an extreme amount of effort. It's much easier when you are a small child because you don't know certain things that would make you question Santa Claus' existence. Like for example, physics.

[Mr.Obvious]

It's like... If I were to 'choose' one day, to be attracted to other men. That's a silly concept for a straight male, isn't it?
I'd just go: now I choose to want to suck cock all day. I don't like it currently, but I'll just now decide to choose to like it. And then what magically follows; you can't for the life of you knock the dicks out of my mouth.

Attraction. Conviction. Preference. Taste. Sources for Delight and fear.
These aren't things that fall under the realm of 'choice'.
And there is a whole difference between 'conviction' or 'faith' or 'lack-of-faith' which are points of view created by your history and the current information you have on a subject, and things like attraction or taste, which are more 'inate' to us from the moment we are born. (In case of taste, not entirely as you can learn to like food. But I doubt you can learn to like cock in you mouth if you're not into that to begin with.)

[Aroura]

I challenge anyone on this forums to change their belief or disbelief in something, anything, simply by choosing to do so.

You can't.

Example:
Let's say I think feminism is fantastic, but I decide I'm going to chose to believe that patriarchy is the way to go. Just to prove it's a choice!

The simple act of deciding you want to change something isn't enough. I would then need to go research and find things that would drive my ideology towards patriarchy. In essence, I'd be looking for something to cause me to change my mind. Cause----->effect.
But if I didn't truly desire to change my mind, or if I found the evidence uncompelling, I wouldn't be able to do it. Not enough cause....so no effect.
And I cannot choose what I desire. None of choose that. I can't decide I like Coke better than Pepsi, again, without some driving fore behind the "choice" that essentially makes it no choice at all.

No one has ever demonstrated to me that they have made a free choice, insofar as they define free as completely without restraint or acted on by outside forces. We are (hopefully, in most places today) free to pursue what you desire within the bounds of acceptable societal constructs without a gun to our heads, yes (and this is how many will define free will, or free choice, called compatibilism), but we are never free to choose what those desires are or how compelling we find them (which is the idea of Libertarian Free will). The latter is nonsense, magical thinking at its worst.

[Fake Messiah]

Now this is very interesting to me because I have heard this argument from certain Christian denominations before (namely Calvinism, which I am not of that camp) but from the inverse idea that one cannot choose to believe God because only God can choose us.

This is indeed something that Calvinists believe. Calvinists agree with the rules of the game as formulated by John Calvin, a theologian, not coincidentally, trained as a lawyer who preached that only a small minority of people go to Heaven and those "elect" were chosen by God before they were born, before the beginning of time, so nothing anybody did in life could change his or her probably hellbound trajectory.

And that does have basis in the Bible because some parts of it say that humans indeed don't have free will in this and everybody is already predestined, like

Romans 8:29-30
For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate.... Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.

Ephesians 1:4-5
He hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will.

2 Timothy 1:9
Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began.